GUYS!!!! I've GOT AMAZING NEWS!!!!
May be somebody has heared about project TES: Andoran. This project also was developing on the Oblivion engine. And now I've read news on the project official page (http://andoran.com/)
if tell in few words: THEY'VE CONVERTED MOST OF THE PROJECT TO THE TES V ENGINE. THE ENGINES ARE VERY SIMILAR AND IT'S POSSIBLE TO CONVERT MOST WITH THEIR PROGRAM, WITHOUT ANY TROUBLES!!!!
But this is not all. THEY ARE ALSO WORKING ON TRANSFERRING POWER, STRENGTH AND OTHER ATTRIBUTES TO SKYRIM!

PS. On the site you can watch their trailer on the Skyrim engine. Guys! We need somebody who will work with converting to contact this team! It will extremely push forward all our dreams and work!
Developers' contact-mail: andorantes@gmail.com

Great find Ramms, that sounds like some serious buisness converting, hopefully projects like these will become more accessible to us, its good to see we arent the only ones trying to move stuff between engines. Anyone think they can get an email to the devs going? Im not sure how much success we'll have with a language barrier in the way but its certainly worth a shot,

I think language isn't a problem. Andoran's developers know English. And I must notice one important thing. They've got converter since September. Skyrim's Developers grants converter to the Andoran's developers. So firstly we need to write a very good and persuasive letter. I don't think they'll give converter so easily. But I think it's possible.
ps I can translate without any problems letter from English to Russian language. If we will met language misunderstanding.

Andoran's team not just a common mod developers team. They have got connections with Skyrim's Publisher in Russia (1C). It can't be a unnoficial port, because they are star porting before Skyrim's officially out.(How i already mentioned, in September)

Wouldn't such a converter land Bethesda in legal trouble? You know that Morroblivion still exists because Bethesda did not have a hand in developing it. Here, you say that Bethesda made a converter. Several problems exist in your statement:

-Why, oh why, does Bethesda make a converter as it will not gain any money for it? OK, sure it will move sales for Morrowind and Oblivion but for a single mod? Making a converter takes hundreds of man hours to make, even if the engines are similar.

-Andoran is pretty big in the modding community. People would find out that instead of working harder on Skyrim, they instead choose to make a converter and move sales of its previous games. If so, Bethesda just make games now just because of the new tech so modders can play around with it. Bethesda risks its reputation this way.

-Legal trouble. Bethesda may have licensed assets for Oblivion and the company would sue Bethesda for millions of dollars. Why would a big company take such a stupid move? They know Morroblivion still exists and one day, Morribliviskyrim may exist. If they had a hand in developing it and Morrobliviskyrim is official, then wave bye-bye to Beth as they will be sued.

Firstly, we don't need to discuss now, why, or what etc. We need just write a letter to the Andoran's developers, and learn about the converter from them. Because I'm just a user, and tell only what I've read before.
Edit:
http://tamriel.ru/news/14.esp here you can read public message to the community from Andoran's team.(on Russian) It posted on the New Year. The main interesting thing - they are using not Skyrim Role System, they are using own system, near to the TES III.
ps I can't edit my first post, so here is the english version of e-mail, and project page.
http://www.andoran.com/indexen.htmlandoran.slag@gmail.com

I did a few google searches and there's no mention of Andoran on the skyrim engine or the porting over of attributes. Odd...
Edit: that's better! Still, they said that attributes are gone in the skyrim version. On the other hand we have solid evidence! :)
On another note, here is how a cliff racer behaves in Skyrim:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1mdkw5sWeE&feature=youtube_g...

I don't know how we should write our persuasive letter to the Andoran team, but one of the main points we should get across is what makes us unique: unlike 99% of mods out there, we're not out there for glory or praise by making an amazing new original mod.

Instead, we're doing something much more: keeping the dream of Morrowind alive. Keeping Morrowind alive is important because some people for some reason can't get into the original Morrowind. With Morroblivion, we've gotten a lot of people to play and experience the magic of Morrowind they otherwise wouldn't get with TES3. I believe with Morroskyrim, we'll double or triple that.

The bottom line is that we're allowing players who couldn't get into Morrowind before, a second chance.

Very cool news RammS!As far as a letter is concerned, we'd want to run it by project leads first, then outline our points, etc, then have someone draft a letter, and then refine it from there, and it would warrant it's own thread.

Guys, some information about Andoran's converting prog:
they found differences between skyrim and obl .esm
and then just wrote a prog, to simply clear these differences, then they are just used all models, objects, etc from skyrim to replace original oblivion items, with "hands" to don't break the Skyrim license.
before:
later:
How you can see, all objects on the same place, but with new models.
And Full sails on the Skyrim screen. They are using Skyrim possibilities to increase level of interacting (added sails repair-action), and now you can rule this ship.
ps so we are just need a good programmer, to write prog. I this prog isn;t difficult, we just need to find differences, and replace them.

So do I understand this correctly? The Andoran team made a program that converts Oblivion Andoran objects into Skyrim Andoran objects. The Vanila Oblivion objects that remained were then replaced with Skyrim equivalents.

But the bottom line is, they have a program that converts Oblivion objects (texture and meshes?) to Skyrim objects.

I am programmer that is currently works on the Andoran converter. It was real surprise to me to see such topic here. For now I have not so much time and I had brief look through it. For now I will just say that language really is not the problem. Now the main thing that brought me here. I have really not much time at the moment and I'm searching for a programmer who would be able to help me with my converter application. If there is anyone who knows C++ and wants to help me it would be really great. Thanks.

If we could connect Andoran and Morroblivion then that would be amazing.

What sort of connection do you mean?

robertneville777 wrote:

Holy crud, if what you say is true, this is awesome, thanks for stopping by!

I think Raditz and EnvyDeveloper might have some experience with C++.

What do you mean? It is true that I am member of the Andoran team and this is true that I'm currently working on the Converter by my own. So as I said before I need some help, mostly with debugging. Architecture, coding and so on is almost done. More of that I have tested some pieces of converted data in the CK and it was opened without any errors.

RADlTZ wrote:

Ive used C++ a little before, just a bit of bare minimum tinkering, but I can always give it a better go.

Hey Anruin, sorry if my comment offended you. It wasn't that I didn't believe you. It's just that I'm so amazed that you want to help us, that I was kinda shocked XD
Anyways, getting down to business, I have a little experience with c++. I took a intro to programming that mainly used c++ but what was stupid was when we finally got to the object oriented part, the class ended.
If you want, you can send me the source code, and I'll take a look at it, and I'll see how comfortable I feel with the complexity of the code. But I can't promise anything.
I'll be taking a much more serious c++ class in the fall, but that's quite a ways away.
Steph, that sounds great! I'm eager to hear if he can help.

This is interesting [seaching all my old boxes for my Borlands C++ stuff].

From my seat it looks like that all that is needed is to write a program that converts all of the oblivion and morroblivion globals to skyrim globals and then make standalone object oriented sections with thier own local variables etc for each section [meshes/textures/sound/LOD etc].

The main problem as I see it will be porting over the scripts because they will need to be converted by hand to the CK format.

Ice: I think that we will share it, of course. Thank you so much. I'm glad to see so warm comments here.

Sjors: We have released the "Andoran: Axis" mod if you don't know. It is the first part of Andoran story. Prologue is the second. Maybe later we will need some help with sounding, but it should be human voice. But thanks for offering.

steph: Thanks for that.

robertneville777: It's ok, don't bother. Thank you :) We can contact via ICQ if you want so we can discuss everything. As I have said before I need help mostly with debugging. Main work in the file and direct memory access, reading and writing using byte buffers.

ironman12345: What do you mean globals? TES data files are composed from parts called the "ITEMS" by Bethesda, and items in their turn composed from the "CHUNKS". Globals is the global gameplay variables. And it looks that you think that everything it is quite simple to make such app don't you? Scripts cannot be converted as the many other items of the TES4 data files. Most of them deprecated in TES5 other have been changed. I have studied most of the needed items and wrote code for their conversion except a few.

Still can't understand you. Are you talking about converter architecture? If so below is brief description of my app's architecture and its work algorythm.

Firstly my app was reading TES4 data file, building TES5 data file in the app's memory space. Then it was writing the file onto hard drive. But it worked only for small and medium-sized files, less then approx. 20MB in size, consumping about 2GB of RAM.

Now I have rebuilt it to use as little memory as possible, so now it should be able to convert large data files.

Disassemble? Even if we will close our eyes on the legal rights and so on... Do you know what is it to disassemble an application and how much time man would spend to parse the disassembled code, find the parts used to parse data files? And moreover then he would need to write new code in C++ or other HL, based on the found algorythms and ASM instructions. It is really faster to write app like mine. I have some experience with disassembling and I'm think that would not work.

Ok all,I understand what you are saying and agree that using a stand alone convertion tool would be better,I quess I just got carried away with the mad idea to try to reprogram the whole ES series into one program.

Fixed some bugs and it seems to be working in generally as it should now, it slovenly converts some groups from the TES4 to TES5. So I think that files which it produces now wouldn't be opened in CK without lot of errors, unlike it was before. Some time ago it was able to create clean TESV files with basic objects which CK understood.

Later I will try to include some code for most precise conversion (has been written before and is disabled for now) and then I will continue to work with worldspaces (that scares me a bit at the moment :D)

JB, you have nickname of man who once made the Children of the Night for Morrowind. Is that was you? :D

Sorry, I've made mistake :D guys made just one mod, the Cyrodiil Rebuild, and TES4: Revenge will be available later. Download is available only in russian for now, but you can try to launch it on english. :( If someone could help with translating it would be something.

My friend tells me that although he would enjoy doing it he does not have time now. Real world projects and his job come first,

He also told me he knows about Oblivion, Skyrim, Steam, and Bethsoft and doesn't want to get involved in a legal battle if Bethsoft wants to get mean about things. I agree. Using Steam means you don't buy a game any more, you just rent it and you're at the mercy of Steam and Bethsoft. As long as you keep a good relationship with them everything is fine. Step out of line or lose your internet connection and they will cut off your ability to play the game.

Your words have the sense. But what about game developers, the Steam is best defence vs piracy I think. Also I want to say that Andoran has the permission granted to make an app and translate our addon on the new engine. In any case, Skyrim wouldn't lose anything 'cause of converter app. If we'll make our Andoran: Prologue on the new engine, and you'll made your Skyrimorroblivion, it can happen that more people would want to by Skyrim to play Andoran :D